finding a new companion. At the end of the year, the man returns the suit to his friend and they talk about superstitions and T.V.s over beer and champagne. At a New Year's Eve party at a bar in Roppongi, the man is introduced to a mysterious woman who claims she "killed" someone that looks like the man five years ago. They discuss this "killing" before they go their own way. In the final section, a press release-style passage tells of miners trapped underground as the outside world tries to save them. "Airplane: Or, How He Talked to Himself as If Reciting Poetry" A twenty-year-old man meets regularly with a married woman seven years his senior at her place regularly to have sex; her husband is often out-of-town for his job and her daughter is in kindergarten. She has an idiosyncratic habit of crying for a set amount of time every so often and he has a peculiar practice of reciting "poetry" under his breath and not remembering any of it. One day she decides to write down what he says and they learn it is about airplanes. They try to make meaning of it but they conclude that he must mention airplanes for some ineffable reason. That day, she also cries twice, the only time this happens in all the time the two are acquainted. "The Mirror" A man tells the story of how he worked as a night watchman at a school in a small town in Niigata Prefecture shortly after graduating from high school. His job was simple: patrol the premise at nine P.M. and three A.M. During a windy night in October, while he is patrolling the campus, he sees himself in a mirror by the entrance. At first, he is surprised but after a few minutes he becomes horrified: the person in the mirror is not him. In a panic, he drops his cigarette, smashes the mirror, and rushes back to his quarters. In the morning he learns that there are no signs of a mirror from the previous night. Because of this incident, the man states that he does not have any mirrors in his house. "A Folklore for My Generation: A Prehistory of Late-Stage Capitalism" A narrator meets an old classmate from his high school days in Kobe during his trip to Lucca. In a frame story, the classmate tell about his relationship